The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope will be named for an influential astronomer who left the field better than she found it. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, a flagship astronomy and astrophysics ...

Once the most popular framework for physics beyond the Standard Model, supersymmetry is facing a reckoning—but many researchers are not giving up on it yet. The Standard Model of particle physics is ...

Nearly 75 years after the puzzling first detection of the kaon, scientists are still looking to the particle for hints of physics beyond their current understanding. All Clifford Charles Butler and ...

For decades scientists have tried to find a way to measure the mass of the lightest matter particle known to exist. Three new approaches now have a chance to succeed. In 1980, Hamish Robertson was a ...

The fundamental particle of light is both ordinary and full of surprises. What physicists refer to as photons, other people might just call light. As quanta of light, photons are the smallest possible ...

Neutrinos don’t seem to get their mass in the same way as other particles in the Standard Model. In 1998, researchers made a discovery that challenged their understanding of particle physics and ...

Amy Catanzano bridges the worlds of poetry and science. In April 2018, Amy Catanzano sat in her loaned office at the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook University in New York, ...

Our best model of particle physics explains only about 5 percent of the universe. The Standard Model is a thing of beauty. It is the most rigorous theory of particle physics, incredibly precise and ...

Every six months on the spring and autumn equinoxes, a serpent slithers down the side of the El Castillo pyramid in Chichén Itzá, Mexico. Well, it’s not a real serpent—it’s an optical illusion caused ...

A possible explanation for the lightness of neutrinos could help answer some big questions about the universe. Mass is a fundamental property of matter, but there’s still a lot about it we don’t ...

For more than two decades, amateur photographer Dale Carter has documented the physicists who come to the Black Hills for their research. Photography is sometimes thought of as one part skill and one ...

The Higgs boson is the only fundamental particle known to be scalar, meaning it has no quantum spin. This fact answers questions about our universe, but it also raises new ones. When it was first ...